u/HauntingPsyche

I (39M) recently became friends with a coworker (48F). At first we clicked immediately. We joked around at work, got along well, and she started inviting me over to her condo on our days off. I thought I'd finally met someone I could actually have interesting conversations with, a fun friend. The more I've gotten to know her, though, the more confused and frustrated I've become.

Every single time we hang out, the conversation is almost entirely about her. It's the exact same topics every day: her alcoholism, depression, boyfriend, daughter, mother she hates, father who passed away, coworkers she dislikes, patients she thinks are annoying, how hard her life has been, how fat she thinks she is, how ugly she thinks other people are, and whatever emotional crisis she's currently focused on.

I don't mind listening. Friends should absolutely be able to vent. But it's almost like the conversation never leaves orbit around her. Meanwhile, whenever I try to talk about myself, it usually goes one of a few ways:

- she ignores what I said and changes the subject

-she tells me I'm "weird"

-she tells me what I'm talking about is "boring"

-she barely acknowledges it before steering the conversation back to herself.

I'm the kind of person who genuinely enjoys asking open-ended questions, talking about interesting observations, psychology, random thought experiments, photography or art or music and/or ideas involving these things as a creative person, philosophy, or just exploring how another person's mind works. I love finding out how peoples' brains work and their personal perception of this world. I work in the mental health field with this woman, so I figured at least she would have some interest in psychology or helping people, but no, even that stuff is boring/weird/too deep, or she will admit to me how much she hates the patients and doesn't want to help or deal with them (very much the opposite of my own thoughts and feelings on helping the mentally ill and homeless). The thing is that she used to say that these things about me were what she liked, would call me "delightfully happy and funny" with "good spirits and a good outlook on life" but now she shuts down almost all of it. "That's weird." "That's boring." End of conversation.

Ironically the only time she seems curious about me now is if it's related to my addiction history or some traumatic thing I've been through, and even then she only lets me get a little bit out before steering the conversation about to her or saying something dismissive or kind of hurtful. Almost like she's only briefly entertained by the idea of me having gone through massive pain in my life as well because it makes her feel less alone, but she struggles caring about me or at least showing any care about me in any other way.

Another thing - my addiction and traumatic events have been massive and frequent and intense, I've had a very hard life, but I don't dump all of that on people or constantly talk about it. But when I DO mention having just a rough day or experience or feeling overwhelmed, it often gets turned into a statement about who I am instead of what I'm experiencing currently/temporarily. If I mention one bad day, I'll hear things like "negative Nancy", "you're so depressed", or that I'm dwelling on things. To me, talking about a rough day isn't the same thing as making it my identity. Sometimes I'm literally just telling someone how my day went.

Meanwhile she'll spend hours talking about her own problems - often the same ones we've discussed many times before - and that's apparently completely different in her eyes. The repeating of stories/experiences is actually starting to concern me. She says the same exact things every single time we hang out, and I don't know if she genuinely doesn't remember having told me before, or if she's just expecting me to react to them and talk about them over and over with her/maybe she doesn't even care how about how strange it is socially.

Then there's the judgment: she's UNBELIEVABLY harsh and hypocritical to strangers. She'll call overweight people things like "disgusting failures", "walking trash", and "living tragedies". She makes comments about people's appearances constantly, including the patients we work with. The other day I finally (very calmly/almost trying to laugh it off a little cuz I didn't know how else to fucking respond) told her that I honestly thought those comments were mean. She looked genuinely shocked and asked me if I was serious. Then she told ME that I was being the mean one for telling her her comments were mean! She also suggested that maybe my thinking was "clouded" from my medical marijuana I had smokedf, as if weed had somehow been the reason that I thought calling strangers "walking trash" was cruel, and not because it just objectively IS.

What also confuses me is that she's incredibly judgmental despite living in circumstances she doesn't seem to judge herself by. Her condo is frequently covered in dog urine, dirty dishes piled up, trash accumulation, and she spends most of her time on the couch. Oh, she also proudly doesn't pick up her dog's shit when she walks her and thinks it's funny to leave it. Yet she'll make relentless comments about other people's weight, appearance, intelligence, or lives over the smallest perceived flaw.

She also talks constantly about how difficult her life has been, but from what she's shared with me, her father financially supported her for her entire life up until he passed, gave her the condo she lives in now for free, as well as the car she has, and before the job she has now where we work together, the only "job" she ever had before was working for her father at the restaurants he owned. She also has agoraphobia but claims she's "cured" and has even quit therapy, even though she refuses to go anywhere but a handful of places, and quite literally stopped paying for internet services entirely in her life and only has a free government phone with text and calls only so that she wouldn't have GPS/has an excuse to not ever have to go anywhere because "she'd get lost".

I'm not saying she hasn't struggled emotionally - she clearly has - but there's a disconnect between how compassionately she views her own life and how harshly she judges everyone else's.

The confusing part is that she continues inviting me over and insists she likes having me around and over there, but at this point I feel like she's just using me for company/to avoid extreme loneliness despite possibly not even really liking me or my personality, and also using me for basically what is becoming free therapy whether she realizes it or not. Like I mentioned earlier, it feels like she only gets excited/happy when I talk about some of the crappy things I went through because it probably makes her feel less alone in her struggles.

When I'm with someone, I naturally want to know how they think, what they notice, what excites them, what weird ideas they've had, what they believe, and what makes them who they are. That's what makes friendships and getting to know people interesting to me.

With her, it feels like that curiosity only goes one way: towards herself or her beneficial emotional-gain from the conversation. And for me it isn't at all the lack of "airtime"/not getting to talk about myself much, it's just the lack of reciprocal interest.

Part of me wonders if I'm expecting too much too soon from this friendship: we've been coworkers for six months, and recently started hanging out together/becoming closer friends in the last two months. But then another part of me wonders if she's simply so wrapped up in her own world, between being coddled her entire life up until her father passing, mixed with her agoraphobia, that maybe she doesn't even realize how dismissive she comes across.

I have gone through a lot in my life as is, plus my job is emotionally draining helping the mentally ill and homeless and abused every day, I just don't have it in me to take on anymore of other people's problems and mental illnesses... But at the same time I recently completely restarted my life after moving to this city, and I was hoping to be able to make some friends, and one thing I've learned in life is that everyone is fucked up in some way and carrying their own pain and story. This is a part of getting to know some people, and she clearly has a lot of problems. I don't want to hurt her feelings in any way, but I don't think she's going to handle it very well when I attempt to explain this to her, and she will possibly just call me "mean" or not be able to view this outside her perspective. I just wanted to make a cool friend that I could chill with occasionally, not spend my free time giving free therapy to someone who acts like I'm boring and weird outside of that...